Visit Our Emergency Dentist Office for Help When You Need It

What is an emergency dentist?

From a purely service perspective, you would be hard-pressed to find the differences between an emergency dentist and a regular dentist. This is because, even as an emergency dentist, we do all the same things that a non-emergency dentist does. We have patients who come in on a regular schedule for their cleaning, examinations, and maintenance. We have patients who need to discuss braces and dentures or have their cavities filled. We even have emergency situation patients who come in during normal business hours. The hours are what sets an emergency dentist apart from your normal dentist. The emergency dentist is available 24 hours a day, seven days per week. What we found was that most of the time things like accidents do not happen on a set schedule. They happen at the strangest, most inconvenient times. When your dentist, on the other hand, is a non-emergency dentist, they tend to work normal business hour, typically between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. The challenge with this is that in the event of a dental emergency that takes place at 1 a.m. on Saturday morning, for example, your dentist is not available to treat you, so you have two choices. You can hold on till 9 a.m. on Monday morning to deal with the discomfort of a raging toothache, or you can come in and see an emergency dentist. We found that many of the dental accidents we treat actually happen when people are more relaxed and involved in leisure activities. There is a much higher chance of biting down hard and breaking a filling at the neighborhood barbeque than there is while you are warming up your TV dinner to take back to your office.

When is an emergency dentist visit appropriate?

There is really no time that a visit to an oral health professional is not appropriate. However, in terms of visiting a dentist for an emergency, we have a relatively simple rule of thumb with regard to pain. Bleeding and lost teeth are among such scenarios. If you are in pain and considering visiting an emergency dentist, you should come in to see us if you cannot control the pain with over-the-counter medication, if the pain keeps coming back, or if it is a sharp pain. Regardless of control, if you are not able to bear the discomfort, you should definitely come in and see an emergency dentist. If you are bleeding or if you have lost a tooth, that is an immediate call to see an emergency dentist. When you have had a tooth knocked out or cracked, you have a limited time to save the tooth and so need to ensure that you come in immediately.

What happens at the Emergency Dentist?

Once you come in, we do a number of things. First, we want to make sure you are comfortable or if any discomfort you may have is taken away. Then we will run you through a full dental examination, including x-rays and other dental imaging as necessary to find the problem, which we can then treat.